Looking At Disparities Through The Lens of Race

How properly could someone assess your life by taking a glance at the clothes in your closet? Can these garments tell the significant events of your life? Do they say when you got married, had a baby, graduated from college, got promoted in your job, retired, had surgery, or became a grandparent? The answer is no. Clothes, shoes, and hats are impermanent and tell us little. From a biological perspective, our skin and its coloration suffers the same fate. It comes in many varieties, but tells us almost nothing about our underlying differences.

Not a week goes by that I do not read an argument by an often-professed race-realist presenting that the intelligence-related disparities we witness between Blacks, Whites, Asians, Latinos, et al, must be genetic in origin, via ethnicity, since intelligence is more than 50% heritable (percentage of expression of traits directly from genes). In these arguments, the inference of empirical results always trumps the lack of supporting physiological evidence. The discussion typically focuses on IQ, standard test scores, school grades, graduation, and finally, on general behavior.

We all live each day looking through the race lens, but no one is more fanatical than the race-realist. Ardent realists, dedicated students of disparity, ignore the most obvious challenges to their argument that ‘race drives differences’. They ignore that skin coloration is impermanent and by far the most genetically labile organ of the human body, meaning it quickly changes based on the environment, and absent mutation. They ignore the skin’s profound sensitivity and responsiveness to sunlight intensity, and how quickly it must lighten or darken to protect healthy reproduction. They also ignore that skin coloration is of no value in determining phylogenetic relationships (evolutionary history of an organism group) among modern human groups.

The infinitely complex brain, in the alternative, is perhaps the least labile of our organs and has evolved universally, including at least one 'leap', in homo sapiens over tens of thousands of years, and millions of years over the span of humanity (genus homo). I have yet to hear an objective argument from realists reconciling these two physiological extremes, brain versus skin, in human evolution. Minus any such reconciliation, it is scientifically unforgivable to conclude much of anything about brain genetics and race-based outcomes, as viewed through today’s ‘extremely near-sided’ lens of skin coloration.

Researchers continuously look for evidence of inter and intra-group changes in our brains. Mutations have certainly occurred, and on rare occasion have ‘stuck’ (become positively selected). In the case of Ashkenazi Jews and sphingolipid disorders, we know precisely what constitutes evidence of a physiological change that might show itself in intelligence disparity. But in no case has science proved more than a normal distribution of intelligence across the species covering the most recent 50,000 years of brain evolution and travel about the globe. Trying to deduce today’s accumulation of disparate test results through the constantly changing and impermanent lens of race is as futile as searching in a clothes closet.

Various ethnicities certainly reflect different measured intelligence, but the genetic variation/distribution driving these differences occurred, by virtue of a basic time-line analysis, most substantially while waves of advancing dark-skinned homo sapiens were migrating from Africa. Skin color, as we see it today, is an extremely limited analytical tool for looking into the past, or explaining the present.

James C. Collier

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